Forgetting What Might Not Have Happened

I have never seen a David Lynch movie that I have, on the whole, understood. I have, I think, understood portions of Lynch's movies. Then again....

Ethical and slightly off-topic disclaimer: I am not a movie critic. Or, I am not a trained movie critic--I can describe why I like certain movies, but I cannot always argue that a movie is either "good" or "bad" in the same educated, technical way that, say, Pauline Kael once did. More often than not, I tend to focus on dialogue: what's realistic, what's phony, what's forced. I have always enjoyed listening to people--their words and their voices--and I can hear your voice even as I type, even though I might not have not seen (or heard) yours for years.

But, David Lynch... Blue Velvet is linear enough for me to "get." Mulholland Drive is less so (but stars Naomi Watts, and that's good enough.) Eraserhead--too far gone for me. Wild at Heart-- almost as understandable as Blue Velvet. Which brings me to this: For the past year or so I've wanted to watch another Lynch movie, Inland Empire. So, on the first night of a four-day period of coming home to a relatively empty house, I bit the corporate bullet and stepped into Best Buy in search of a movie or two not just to view, but to own. Specifically, I was searching for Inland Empire itself because our local family friendly Blockbuster Video apparently did not stock the film. Best Buy, though, was not the best choice, and I had to rely on Border's to save the night.

My DVD player accepted Inland Empire as though it were a long-lost friend. Skipping through the credits, I sat back with a cold Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde (lager, not woman)--and found the first scene oddly familiar, the second scene predictable. Yes, I had seen the movie before. Don't know when, don't know where (though I suspect it was during a visit to the northern California coast).

Perfectly fine, I thought, for I have misplaced experiences many times before. My backup for the night--and this is part of the fineness--I had also bought Lynch's Lost Highway, and I knew I had not seen this one. And it is, oh, somewhere between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive.

And as you might have guessed, there is more to the story--something that happened today. On the last day of this time alone, I came home from work to find that my son's obnoxious and petulant puppy, probably pissed off that I had not left yet another of my shoes within easy reach, had removed from the bookshelf David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish, turning the book's cover into so much confetti on the living room floor. There are incisor holes in many of the pages.

I want to think that this is a smart dog, that the book's subtitle of "Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" drew her to this book and not to, oh, Frommer's Guide to Vancouver and Victoria. (I mean, how could she possibly get to Canada?) And maybe she had watched a Lynch movie while I was at the office, and she wanted further edification. And, maybe again, she wanted me to find this in Lynch's book:

"You want to do your art, but you've got to live. So you've got to have a job, and then sometimes you're too tired to do your art.

"But if you love what you're doing, you're going to keep on doing it anyway."

Which echoes what a poet/teacher told me recently when I told her that, apparently, poetry is now dead to me: "writing is breathing for us."

Maybe the dog knows this.